UDW day 4, Outlook last day

Today is the last day of the wonderful Ubuntu Developer Week. As always it passes much too quickly. On the other hand we’ll now all have a bit more time to put our ideas into action and play around with all the new things we learnt… but I’m getting ahead of myself, there’s still one day left!

Let’s re-cap yesterday:

Adopt-an-Upstream: Jorge and I had a great time giving this talk. It’s incredibly important for Ubuntu to have good and healthy relationships to other projects. During the session we gave an overview over adopting an upstream, what to bear in mind, why to do it and how it fits into the bigger picture of Ubuntu development.

Kernel patches: Next up was Leann Ogasawara who rocked the house talking about patching the kernel, how the Kernel team works, how to get involved and how to get help. There was loads of questions and lots of interst. Let’s see how many new kernel hackers we’ll have soon! 🙂

Getting more detailed bug reports: QA mastermind Brian Murray shed more light on one of his favourite tools: apport. What’s great about reporting bugs with apport is that it will get a lot of useful information from your system like the version number of the package, which kernel modules were loaded, etc. This eliminates a lot of bug question ping-pong. The best thing about it is though that it is easily extendable. Read the session log to find out how you can get more specific information for packages you’re interested in!

Bazaar and packaging: Jelmer Vernooij did a fantastic talk about Bazaar, Launchpad and Ubuntu/Debian packaging and why they go so good together. In a couple of easily understandable examples he showcased very well how to use them and why they make working with packages so much easier. Awesome!

16:00 UTC, Writing Beautiful Code — Paul Hummer (rockstar): Paul Hummer is with us and he’ll show you how to write python code like a rock star. There’s a lot of worth in writing understandable, easily scanable code and there’s just a few conventions you have to follow to make yourself happier and your fellow contributors as well.

17:00 UTC, Doing merges right — Colin Watson (cjwatson): Merging is one of the inevitable things in open source development. We collaborate, we work together in the open and sometimes we decide to focus our attention on different things, so merges might be a bit more tricky afterwards. Colin Watson has been doing hundreds (if not thousands) of merges in his life, so he’s the perfect person to share a few tips to make the experience more seamless.

18:00 UTC, Meet launchpadlib — Jonathan Lange (jml): Ever found yourself in a position where you neede some data from Launchpad? Ever needed to automate a task that involved something in Launchpad somehow? There’s one answer to all these problems: Use python-launchpadlib. We’ll have Jonathan Lange there who will tell you how to use it efficiently and where best to start.

19:00 UTC, KDE/Kubuntu Junior Jobs/Papercuts — Celest Lyn Paul (seele): You’re a friend of the big K? You have a small usability bug you always wanted to fix? Always wanted to get involved with hacking on KDE somehow? Awesome. Celeste Lyn Paul knows how to do it and she’ll deliver a great session where we’ll talk about exactly that! Awesome!

20:00 UTC, Interpreting Stacktraces — Emmet Hikory (persia): Ever found yourself faced with a crashing application and you were told to decipher some kind of stacktrace? It’s definitely one of the proficiencies that are incredibly helpful and will help you fix a lot of problems. Emmet Hikory will deliver a great session about getting the most information our of stacktraces with the least amount of hassle.